WHO said no proof from US on speculative Wuhan lab claims, seeks data

The World Health Organization said Monday that Washington had provided no evidence to support "speculative" claims by the US president that the new coronavirus originated in a Chinese lab.

"We have not received any data or specific evidence from the United States government relating to the purported origin of the virus -- so from our perspective, this remains speculative," WHO emergencies director Michael Ryan told a virtual briefing.

Scientists believe the killer virus jumped from animals to humans, emerging in China late last year, possibly from a market in Wuhan selling exotic animals for meat.

But US President Donald Trump, increasingly critical of China's management of the first outbreak, claims to have proof it started in a Wuhan laboratory.

And US Secretary of State Mike Pompeo on Sunday said "enormous evidence" backed up that claim, which China has vehemently denied.

"Like any evidence-based organisation, we would be very willing to receive any information that purports to the origin of the virus," Ryan said, stressing that this was "a very important piece of public health information for future control.

"If that data and evidence is available, then it will be for the United States government to decide whether and when it can be shared, but it is difficult for the WHO to operate in an information vacuum in that regard," he added.

Science at the centre

The UN health office - which has likewise confronted scorching analysis from Trump over allegations it at first made light of the reality of the episode to shield China - has more than once said the infection obviously seems to have started normally from a creature



source. 

WHO master Maria Van Kerkhove worried during Monday's informing that there were around 15,000 full genome arrangements of the novel coronavirus accessible, and "from the entirety of the proof that we have seen... this infection is of characteristic birthplace". 

While coronaviruses by and large begin in bats, both Van Kerkhove and Ryan focused on the significance of finding how the infection that causes COVID-19 traversed to people, and what creature filled in as a "middle person have" en route. 

"We have to see increasingly about that characteristic beginning, and especially about middle hosts," Ryan said. 

It was imperative to know "with the goal that we can set up the correct general wellbeing and creature human interface arrangements that will forestall this event once more", he focused. 

The WHO said a week ago it needed to be welcome to partake in Chinese examinations concerning the creature inceptions of the pandemic, which very quickly has murdered almost 250,000 individuals around the world.

"We have offered, as we do with every case in every country, assistance with carrying out those investigations," Ryan said Monday.

"We can learn from Chinese scientists," he said.

But he warned that if questions about the virus origin were "projected as aggressive investigation of wrongdoing, than I believe that's much more difficult to deal with. That is a political issue.

"Science needs to be at the centre," he said.

"If we have a science-based investigation and a science-based enquiry as to what the origin species and the intermediate species are, then that will benefit everybody on the planet."